Last month’s CAPS meeting explored effective institutional tier 2 supports: what processes do we have in place for students who do not master essential standards after our best first instruction, and also how are we extending learning for advanced students who need extensions?

I have been teaching AP English since 2013, so when our speaker, Dr. Luis Cruz asked us to reflect on our extension strategies for advanced and gifted students, I gave myself a mental pat on the back because THIS, this is my wheelhouse. Then…he proceeded to explain what effective extensions are NOT, and I realized I had gotten it wrong. Humbled again. Extension is not: assigning extra work, asking students to teach other students, or *clutches pearls* allowing students to work on assignments from other classes (I am guilty of this one in particular).

Of course, I knew all of this. I’m sure, deep down, we all know this. I’m not suffering from any delusions that I’m somehow extending student learning when I ask my advanced students in the groups to turn and explain concepts to their peers. But it’s easy—in the melee that is trying to get all students to master essential grade level standards—to neglect the needs of the students in our classes who are ready to move on. Ready to go deeper with their learning. We have so many students in our classes whose learning needs are so significant that in the moment, it’s hard to justify spending extra time on those kids who get it. They’re fine. They’ll be fine. Or so we say.

As Dr. Cruz continued his presentation, I found myself thinking less about my students and more about my own children. I’m a mom of three elementary aged children. My son is nine and he is a whiz kid (and I don’t use this phrase lightly). Since he was a baby, learning has been exceptionally easy for him. However, my younger daughters (ages four and six) are more typical in their development. My six year old daughter is still learning how to decode whereas my son read Ready Player One when he was that age. My son—however adept he may be at reading—also happens to be a very reluctant reader. Since daily reading is non-negotiable in our household, it’s a constant battle. So my whiz kid son recently discovered a loophole. He has been offering to read to my daughters in the evening “as long as it counts” for his nightly reading. The tired mom in me says, “Yes. Please—I’ve just spent an entire day teaching teenagers. Please read Junie B. Jones to the girls so that I don’t have to.” As Dr. Cruz spoke, I realized that allowing my son to read a book that has a lexile level of about second grade and having it count as his nightly reading is a twofold denial of opportunity for growth. (1) He is not stretching himself as a reader by reading Junie B. Jones and (2) My daughters are not benefiting from listening to the reading of an adult whose cadences and inflections properly model effective reading, which is something I–the English teacher and passionate reader–could do expertly for them. In addition, my son mumbles when he reads out loud, which is kind of just a side note, but also quite important. Why am I telling you this? There’s a saying that a parent is the child’s first teacher, and in these moments, I fear I might be failing to provide my own children with the tools they need to optimize their learning. How can I—a veteran teacher—justify allowing that in my own household? In the same way that I shouldn’t be expecting my (albeit gifted) nine year old son to model effective reading for my daughters, we also shouldn’t be expecting the advanced students in our classes to teach or assess the struggling students among them. It’s simply unfair. 

To understand what effective extension strategies look like on Hart’s campus, I turned to our resident scientists, Kathryn Smith and Nick Gravel. They’ll need to forgive me when they read my descriptions of their lessons because science was always my least favorite subject in school. Picture this: eyes glazing over. But I’ll do my best.

If you’ve taught at Hart for any length of time, you know that Nick Gravel’s students adore him, which is one of the reasons I chose to observe his class for this blog. On Friday, January 30, Nick had his regular Physics B class studying electric currents with classroom activities centered around the goal of creating magnet fields using a solenoid. *Shoutout to Kathryn Smith for helping me write that description accurately.* The instructions for the activity were to draw the circuit they created, describe what they saw, and explain how it worked, which was an application of what they had learned after several days of lecture. As I sat in Nick’s class, it was apparent to me that there were several students in the class who should really be stretching themselves in AP Physics. For these students, Nick had several extension strategies in place. For one, the activity itself had modifications and extensions built in–students were allowed to explore at their own pace. The advanced students, on several occasions, called Nick over to ask questions that helped them understand the concepts they were learning beyond the scope of the lesson. One student in particular asked several questions that tapped into the WHY of the concept: “Why does it only work for the inside of the magnet?” and “What other factors would affect magnetism?” Additionally, Nick had a pile of electric motors sitting on top of his desk that students had access to if they were ready to move on. These motors used the same scientific principles as the solenoids, but this time to make something move rather than to create a magnetic field. Nick’s lesson highlighted an important principle that I took away from our last CAPS meeting with Dr. Cruz: an important component of MTSS involves considerations for what we do with students who master essential standards quickly. In the same way we must support students who are not mastering essential content, we need to also be providing extensions for students who are ready to move on. This looks like moving students up the Blooms taxonomy pyramid and into the higher levels of the depth of knowledge chart. Nick had already asked students to explain and describe; these are level two skills. Nick’s choice to allow students to make connections, ask why, and compare results moved them up into higher levels of learning.

Similarly, when I arrived at Kathryn’s class on January 9, I immediately noticed that she (having written what looked to me like hieroglyphics on her board) was having students work within higher levels of thinking. Students were making decisions about which formula to use to measure torque. From there, they had to make decisions about the procedures they needed to use to find numbers to plug into their formulas. As she was teaching, I was wondering how Kathryn would extend learning since the entire lesson seemed to already incorporate the highest levels of Blooms. But if you know Kathryn, you know she always has a plan. Kathryn’s classroom is gamified, which means she has built-in incentives for students who master course content. For students who are ready to move on, Kathryn has skill-aligned AP practice FRQs that students can complete for what she calls quest prizes. The FRQs require students to apply the same skills from the lesson, but this time without step-by-step guidance, which is something the students need to be able to do in order to perform well on the AP exam. I asked one of my journalism students later in the day what Ms. Smith’s quest prizes entail, and she enthusiastically explained them to me, which shows me that there is buy-in. Moving from a guided lesson to an incentivized independent application of learning is again an example of moving students into higher levels of DOK and up Bloom’s pyramid. While Kathryn does have her students strategically grouped by skill level for peer support opportunities, she does not count this as an extension.

The most complex levels of learning on the Bloom’s Taxonomy pyramid are evaluate and create. I used to ask my son to evaluate the quality of books he finished and then write Goodreads reviews, but at some point between baseball practice and everyday life, we stopped doing this. If you’ve been a parent for any length of time you know that the best laid plans often go awry. I know I need to get back to this practice with him, but it involves time. The same is true for our classrooms. We all want our students to learn at their highest levels, but time is always an issue, and when we have to make sacrifices, we tend to scrape from the top. What I learned from observing Kathryn and Nick is that extensions do not have to take up a tremendous amount of time, just a bit of strategic thinking and a little bit of an Education 101 refresher.

An anecdote about authentic assessment

At last month’s CAPS meeting, our guiding coalition was asked to reflect on the extent to which our team’s gradebooks were an accurate reflection of student learning. That is to say—as a team—do we avoid things like grading on compliance or completion? Can a student with an A in a class honestly say that they’ve mastered grade-level standards for that class? By extension, can we as teachers honestly say that a student who has a D or an F in a class has not grasped grade level standards? It’s in my nature to be a reflective (read: overthinking) person. So naturally, I thought about my own evolution as a teacher. 

My first four years of teaching were at a school where we were required to input three grades per week—our evaluations depended on it. When I came to Hart in 2017, I was in the habit of blindly putting in X/10 in my gradebook for things like whether or not my students were in uniform each day that week. Wild, right? These were English classes. Can the color of a student’s sneakers reflect how coherently they can defend a thesis? Spoiler: it can’t. I quickly adjusted to the practices my Hart English department colleagues had on the books, and in no time, I felt I could honestly give a bird’s eye look at my gradebook and say that, yes, if a student wasn’t doing well in my class, it was simply because they were not mastering the standards of the course. 

Fast forward to last month’s CAPS meeting, when our guiding coalition colleague, Zach Koebel shared that his Reach students often feel frustrated by the arcane nature of the weighted grading system. They’d come to him feeling baffled when an assignment worth 100 points barely affected their grade (10% weighted category) while an assignment worth 20 points dropped their course grade by a significant margin (40% weighted category). Cue me, feeling implicated—I have a talent for being able to take everything personally. I had a guilty conscience for a specific grading practice of my own that I knew fit the description of what Zach was discussing. I’ve known for a while that I needed to change one assignment in particular. Be it pride or be it conviction, I never changed. I made moderate adjustments over the years, yes, but I never truly fixed the problem. Please note that I am in no way about to make a case against a weighted grading system. I love a weighted grading system. 

In addition to being an over-thinker, it’s also in my nature to be completely candid with people regardless of how it makes me look, so here I go, getting vulnerable. 

I have this assignment in my AP Lang classes that I’m particularly fond of: my podcast challenge. I require students to select a different podcast every quarter and log six hours of listening over the course of ten weeks. I also attach a series of Socratic seminar questions that students respond to via typed responses and then hash out together at the end of each quarter. The seminar questions correspond to the skills we are working on each grading period. The thing is: the assignment is a lot of work, especially when they leave it until the last minute, which high school students are wont to do. And since ChatGPT hit the scene, I’ve had to rethink the way I assess it since so many of the students simply turn to generative AI that they’ve used to do the heavy lifting of the assignment. I ended up making the assignment worth more points, but I entered it into a weighted category that was not worth as much. I guess I truly was trying to trick the students when in 2023 I re-designed the way I graded the assignment: 100 points in the classwork category (10% weighted). I wanted it to feel like the assignment held weight when in reality, I knew it wouldn’t cause a student’s grade to plummet when I inevitably found them to have used ChatGPT to either fill out the log or respond to the seminar questions, or both. 

This change left students who use the assignment as a learning experience in an unfair position. What if a student struggled all quarter and then felt something click for this assessment? Their grade wouldn’t move an inch even if they earned an A on the assignment. I’ve refused to abandon the podcasts simply because the students who do the project in earnest get so much out of it. Selfishly, I also REALLY enjoy talking to the students about the podcasts they are listening to if they are actually listening to their podcasts. But for every student who gets so much out of the project there is a student who turns in nonsense, or worse, simply cheats. This podcast assignment is a textbook example of me “refusing to kill my darlings,” and now, I find myself looking at not only the way I input the assignment into my gradebook, but also the things I even ask them to do for the assignment. Why was I asking them to answer so many Socratic seminar questions when I really only needed to monitor one or two skills?

Here is what I have come up with: rather than giving the students all quarter to complete the assignment, I do periodic check-ins. Each check-in is worth a small portion of the overall grade. I recently even began asking the students to complete some of the seminar responses in class. Each quarter, I have six Socratic seminar questions, and not every question entails an essential standard for that quarter. The non-essential standard questions are the ones I now ask them to complete in class. For example, asking students to characterize the rhetorical situation or identify instances of bias. These questions are important, yes, but at this point, they are review, and they do not measure the essential components of what I’ve been teaching. These responses will go into the gradebook at 10%. I’ve decided to make only one of the six questions go into the gradebook at 50%: this quarter it is the question that asks them to identify and respond to a claim made in the podcast. This is the crux of what we’ve been working on. This will allow me to read their responses more deeply. This will allow me to more accurately measure learning based on what I’ve been teaching. 

Over the years, I’ve been tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water and just go with that which makes my job easier. If so many students complain about the assignment, if it’s also SO MUCH to grade, why not just scrap the assignment completely? Because my podcast challenge is my BABY. It’s an assignment I conceptualized myself and I love it so much. A few years ago I taught the sibling of a student I taught prior to Covid and the mom cornered me during open house and raved that she and her daughter still listen to NYT’s The Daily together even 5+ years after my class, and they get so much out of it. Why would I want to get rid of something that has clearly benefited students so deeply? I do not want to kill my darlings (out of pride) and I also do not want to throw the baby out with the bath water (because of the students who try and therefore benefit), so why not re-evaluate my own grading practices and make the assignment more equitable?

I realize the solution to my podcast assignment doesn’t fully solve the problem. There will always be capable students who perform poorly in a class because they neglect to turn in assignments. Conversely, we will always have those work horse students whose skills are lacking, but manage to pull off a B in a class. However, taking time to really consider the value of the work I put in front of my students allows me to cut what’s not needed so they can get more out of the essentials. Further, carefully crafting assignment point totals and category weights so that they reflect the difficulty or workload of any given assignment is simply an equitable grading practice.